Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man had a huge impact on me, as did Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which was one of 12 books in my college course “Significant Books in Western Religion.”

The Open Syllabus Project (described in this New York Times piece) has collected and drawn data from 1.1 million college syllabi. The text most often assigned? William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style .

“The Sense of Style is a disappointing book. It presents its author as a figure of urbane intelligence — witty, knowing, calmly superior — doing battle against agitated, deluded, self-styled experts. But the enemy in this book is a straw man or woman, or a whole army of straw folk. And the non-imaginary writer whose work poses perhaps the greatest challenge to Pinker’s own claim to authority is nowhere to be found in these pages.”

“Like Pinker, McGrath repeats Geoffrey Pullum’s claim that Strunk and White do not understand the passive voice. As I’ve argued in a response to Pullum’s take on The Elements of Style, that claim is a misreading of the plain sense of Strunk and White’s text.”

“Despite the Wall Street Journal article’s title and opening reference to Strunk and White, the Music Metadata Style Guide makes no mention of grammar or punctuation. NONe. Or none. It covers the more mundane matters of capitalization, spelling, and metadata entry.”